This blog contains studio projects by Dawn Hunter and features images from her sketchbook as well as long term studio projects. Most frequently featured are images from her long term creative project about the life of Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Please scroll through past posts from 2014, 2015 and 2016 to see the progression of the project.

Friday, September 30, 2016

My
artistic practice and aesthetic interests have been profoundly influenced by my
work as a medical illustrator for the new edition of Human Neuroanatomy,
to be published by Wiley-Blackwell Publishing in 2017, by Dr. James R.
Augustine, University of South Carolina School of Medicine. While
creating illustrations for this textbook, I researched the history of brain
anatomy illustration and was particularly struck and inspired by the drawings
of Ramón y Cajal, because they possess artistic merit and a particular type of
observation.

I am creating a
series of drawings and paintings titled Aesthetic Instincts: the
Intersection of Art and Science in the life of Santiago Ramón y Cajal.
This is a comprehensive biographical creative project that, through visual
art, examines and represents the life of Santiago Ramón y Cajal (May 1,
1852 – October 17, 1934). Ramón y Cajal was a Spanish scientist and the
first person to demonstrate that the nervous system was made up of
individual units (neurons) that were independent of one another but linked
together at points of functional contact called
synapses​. Ramón y Cajal illustrated the results of his
studies with elegant drawings of neurons that he proposed work independently or
collectively, and that each individual unit can participate simultaneously in
individual or multiple neuron functions. Ramón y Cajal was
a 1906 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine that was awarded jointly to
another neuroscientist, Camillo Golgi "in recognition of their work on the
structure of the nervous system,” however, their research was mutually
exclusive and embraced opposing theses. Santiago Ramón
y Cajal is considered by many to be the father of modern neuroscience.

Featured in this post are works from
my Cajal Inventory. The forty-five drawings are 11" x
14" each and created through a combination of the following materials:
graphite, ink, pen, marker and acrylic. The drawings are
biographical of Ramón y Cajal, as well as of my creative process within this
project, i.e. some works are my notes from Dr. Augustine's Fundamentals of
Neuroscience course that evolved into completed drawings. The
biographical portraits of Ramón y Cajal are comprised of Ramón y
Cajal, his wife Silvera and their children.

I view my new drawings
and paintings as educational tools that address art, history and
neuroscience. After I read his autobiography, Recollections
of My Life a part of me that felt like some key aspects of Ramón y
Cajal (his humor, and how he imagined himself – particularly in his youth) were
absent from the mainstream discourse patterns about him. My artwork highlights
his personality traits and his private value system essential to his unique
scientific insight that led to his great discovery: that the nervous system is
comprised of individual, independent biological units, i.e. neurons. The
images here are a fusion of surreal and hyper-real portraits, domestic scenes,
and recreations of Ramón
y Cajal scientific drawings. I have
reconstructed his scientific drawings by studying his actual work on display at
the National Institute of Health, Bethesda, MD. I have also re-created
some of his lost childhood drawings, based on the description in his biography.

When I recreate his scientific
drawings, I draw the whole situation of each drawing. Shadows cast
from the drawings are included as are the boundaries created by the mats.
I do this because his drawings were constructed with unconventional
formats. Not only does this approach make spending long hours researching
and drawing his works more creatively interesting, but more importantly, it
serves to emphasize the content and context of his research.

I
have been fascinated with the combination of complements in my visual art. I
have applied this to the form (color selection and composition) and the content
(opposing personalities) in my Cajal Inventory. In color
theory, it is said that complements incite maximum vividness or annihilate each
other.

Ramón
y Cajal’s marriage to Silveria Fañanás García is an example of a highly
functional complementary pairing. Ramón y Cajal in choosing a
mate selected a woman whose character attributes were what he perceived to be a
“perfect” complement to his. In doing so, he believed that their union would be
a great accomplishment or matrimonial disaster. He said publicly
many times that he would not be Ramón y Cajal if it were not for his
wife and he credits her greatly with making his work and the depth of his
research possible. She incited his maximum vividness.

This
work celebrates Ramón y Cajal and his birthday (May Day). I am
symbolically mirroring Ramón y Cajal’s application of complementary contrast in
his marital union. Therefore I elected to use (as defined by Johannes Itten) a
harmonious hexad comprised of three complementary pairs of hue from the color
wheel: blue-violet and yellow-orange, red and green, and yellow-green and
red-violet. Integrated within the pageantry of images are Ramón y Cajal’s
neural drawings, May Day flowers and portraits of Ramón y Cajal; his wife,
Silveria; and their children.